Author: Fiona Paton - Marketing Executive
This month we decided to focus on some of the benefits realised by our clients following successful projects working with Silverbear as their CRM partner. We’re highlighting how a successful digital transformation programme (i.e. with effective project management and governance, adequate support for change management, and which harnesses the benefits of ultra-modern cloud tools) can significantly improve performance at membership organisations.
When framing this, one of the most interesting factors to consider is the different ways organisations measure the impact of working with Silverbear to report on return on investment and benefit realisation. Our objective as a digital partner is to support our clients to become more efficient, but simply installing new software doesn’t guarantee this. It’s particularly important to proactively analyse the impact new tools have on organisational performance to highlight the difference it is making.
One organisation who closely monitored the impact of their Silverbear 365 system is the Expert Witness Institute (EWI), having gone live with Silverbear in the summer of 2020. Their old CRM system, built on an on-premises version of Dynamics, was unable to support their ambitious growth plans and limited how they communicated with members. The Silverbear project focused on delivering a platform that has become their prime engine for organisational growth and effectively unifies EWI’s CRM and CMS systems.
When presenting the impact of the project, Simon Berney-Edwards, EWI’s CEO, explained that he was able to measure tangible, and significant, improvements to several core business processes since adopting Silverbear 365:
Figure 1 – Time savings on core EWI business processes following adoption of Silverbear 365
Simon explained he knew Silverbear 365 would save the organisation a lot of time attributable to manual, paper-based tasks, but he had not anticipated such a significant performance improvement – a total reduction of 94%. He also explained that the discipline of examining this impact had really driven home what a huge improvement the platform is delivering to him and his colleagues.
Another client that has been examining benefit realisation since moving to the cloud is the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), who migrated its on-premises CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, whilst they saw a dramatic increase in its business-as-usual operations supporting nurses, students, and nursing support workers throughout the crisis.
The new system, built on Silverbear 365, is used by over 800 staff, supports over 450,000 nursing members, and handles ~£7m of subscription income each month.
Silverbear’s technology integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform to deliver tangible results for RCN, adding strategic value as well as enhanced support to its members. A key benefit is being able to use Microsoft’s Dataverse, which allows the RCN’s wider platform to interoperate with Silverbear 365 functionality and means the RCN’s team can add its own strategic value and customisation. Rather than outsourcing this work, as it had done previously, the RCN can now develop further capability themselves and increase user engagement.
Silverbear is extremely proud of its work to support leading membership organisations in the UK and Ireland to embrace digital transformation and modernise their business processes. Supporting organisations to fully understand the impact this work delivers is a critical part of the puzzle.
EWI’s case study webinar is available to stream online here and the RCN digital transformation journey is available to download here.